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Suggested title: Project 2025 and America’s Plan: A Structural Comparison
Excerpt: A serious comparison of two comprehensive civic infrastructure projects — what each is trying to do, where their values diverge, what they share structurally, and what America’s Plan should honestly learn from the one that already worked.
Two comprehensive civic infrastructure projects are operating in American public life right now. One has already reshaped the federal government. The other is being built from scratch with a fraction of the resources. Both are serious about the long game. That symmetry deserves honest examination — not to equate them, but to learn from it.
Project 2025 is a top-down infrastructure for capturing executive power and using it to implement a specific ideological agenda. America’s Plan is a bottom-up infrastructure for giving ordinary affected people the tools to organize, plan, and hold power accountable across time. Their goals could not be more opposed. Their structural logic is closer than most people on either side would find comfortable to admit.
This article examines both honestly — what each is trying to do, where their underlying values diverge, where they are structurally comparable, and what America’s Plan should learn from the one that already worked.
What Each Project Is Trying to Do
Project 2025 was established in 2022 by the Heritage Foundation with Paul Dans as director. Its centerpiece was a 920-page policy document called Mandate for Leadership, published in April 2023. But the document was only one of four pillars. The others were a personnel database of approximately 20,000 vetted loyalists, a Presidential Administration Academy that trained recruits for government roles, and a secret 180-day post-inauguration playbook specifying what to do in the first months of a new administration. More than 100 partner organizations contributed. Heritage spent $22 million on staffing recommendations alone.
The goal was not merely to influence policy. It was to control the machinery of the executive branch — to staff it with ideologically screened loyalists, to reclassify tens of thousands of civil servants as political appointees through Schedule F, and to use that control to implement a specific Christian nationalist policy agenda across healthcare, education, the environment, and civil rights. By the fourth day of Trump’s second term, nearly two-thirds of executive actions mirrored Project 2025’s recommendations.
America’s Plan is attempting something structurally different at every level. Its goal is not to capture government but to build the civic infrastructure through which ordinary people who live with problems can organize to address them. Its four-stage pipeline moves from experience to organizing to building and pushing for change to tracking and enforcing accountability. Its platform layers — an anchor article site, a deliberation forum, a planned civic commons and wiki, and newsletter and social presence — are designed to be usable by ordinary people without insider access. Where Project 2025 concentrated its attention on staffing executive agencies, America’s Plan centers affected people as primary actors and treats credentialed expertise as a resource in service of that work, not as a replacement for it.
These are fundamentally different answers to the same underlying question: where should power be located, and who should wield it?
Where the Values Diverge Most Sharply
The structural contrast runs all the way down to foundational premises.
Project 2025’s philosophical foundation is unitary executive theory — the idea that the president should exercise near-total control over the executive branch, unconstrained by an independent civil service or administrative state. The people who count, in this framework, are the people loyal to the executive and to the ideological vision he represents. The Mandate for Leadership is explicit: it defines “the family” in biblical terms, asserts that life begins at conception, identifies “cultural Marxism” and “woke propaganda” as threats to be dismantled by government, and frames the project as restoring a specifically Christian vision of American governance. Rights are described as “God-given,” but the God in question is particular, and the definition of who possesses full civic standing is correspondingly narrow.
America’s Plan begins from the opposite premise: human rights and democratic norms precede institutional interests, and those rights belong to everyone affected by public decisions — not to those who hold power, not to those who agree with a particular ideology, and not to those vetted for loyalty. Its explicit position is that politics is a struggle over power, but the goal of that struggle is accountability to outcomes and rights, not the installation of a governing class.
The contrast on secrecy and transparency is equally stark. Project 2025’s 180-day playbook was not public. Its personnel database was ideologically screened in private. Its coordination happened across 100+ organizations without public deliberation. Speed and secrecy were features, not bugs — the goal was to be ready to move faster than opposition could organize.
America’s Plan’s theory of change depends on the opposite: public knowledge that is shareable and structured, civic work that accumulates visibly, and deliberation — not debate, not polling, but sustained public reasoning — as the mechanism through which plans are tested and improved. Secrecy is not just ethically incompatible with that theory; it is functionally self-defeating.
On expertise: Project 2025 used credentialed loyalists — people with the right ideology and the right résumé, trained to occupy specific roles. America’s Plan inverts this. Expertise serves affected people rather than replacing them. The people living with a problem are the primary actors; research, writing, and facilitation support that work rather than substituting for it.
These are not just different policy preferences. They are different answers to the question of what democracy is for.
Where They Are Structurally Comparable — and What That Reveals
The intellectual honesty this comparison demands is this: Project 2025 and America’s Plan share a structural logic that most single-issue campaigns and electoral projects do not.
Both are comprehensive across multiple domains rather than focused on a single issue or election cycle. Both started building before their moment arrived. Both are organized around a theory of how change actually happens, not just what change they want. Both are designed to leave behind durable infrastructure. Both treat the question of who is doing the work, and whether those people are prepared, as a first-order concern. Both are built around accumulated knowledge — the Mandate for Leadership on one side, the planned commons and wiki on the other. Both use multiple coordinated layers rather than a single platform or document.
That last point deserves emphasis. Project 2025 was not a policy document. It was a policy document plus a personnel pipeline plus a training academy plus a deployment playbook plus a coordination layer across 100+ organizations. Each layer supported the others. The Mandate gave the database a shared vocabulary; the academy prepared the database recruits; the playbook told them what to do when they got there.
America’s Plan is designed with the same layered logic: anchor articles give the forum a spine; the forum generates deliberation that feeds the commons; the commons accumulates structured knowledge that supports new issue hubs; issue hubs give affected people an entry point into the pipeline. The architecture is sound.
The comparison reveals something important about why progressive and left-leaning movements have struggled despite persistent public majorities on specific policy questions. They have typically operated with a policy platform plus a campaign model — mobilize for an election, push a bill, win or lose, demobilize. Project 2025 operated with a comprehensive infrastructure model that treated the campaign as merely the deployment moment for work that had been done years in advance. That gap is not about resources alone. It is about whether the infrastructure gets built at all.
What America’s Plan Should Learn — and Apply
This is the most important section of this article, and it requires taking the lessons seriously rather than extracting comfortable ones.
Participation is infrastructure, the way personnel is policy. The single most important insight Project 2025 operationalized was that having the right people in the right roles, trained and ready, was not a secondary concern — it was the mechanism of change. America’s Plan needs the equivalent insight applied to its own model: the people who participate in issue hubs, moderate forums, write anchor articles, and facilitate deliberation are the infrastructure. Twenty people doing serious sustained work beats twenty thousand lurkers. A participant pipeline — how to recruit, orient, develop, and retain contributors — is not an administrative concern. It is the project’s core function.
Write the playbook before you need it. Project 2025 had specific executive orders drafted, agency transition plans written, and personnel slotted before Trump won. The lesson is not to draft executive orders — it is to have ready-made templates, guides, and frameworks available before they are urgently needed. Issue hub launch templates, deliberation facilitation guides, accountability tracking frameworks, commons contribution protocols: these should exist before a new issue or participant surge arrives. The commons and wiki are the right vessel for this material, but they have to be built proactively, not assembled under pressure when the moment has already arrived.
Use the anchor document as a coordination device. The Mandate for Leadership was not just a policy document. It was a coordination device that gave 100+ partner organizations a shared reference point, a common vocabulary, and a signal of seriousness that attracted further investment. America’s Plan’s anchor articles and issue-specific documents need to function similarly — not as a single manifesto, but as a set of documents serious enough that other organizations and participants can orient around them, cite them, argue with them, and improve them. The Blueprint post gestures at this function; the site needs to execute it consistently across issues.
The work done before the crisis determines the response to the crisis. Project 2025 began in 2022 for a 2024 election and spent years preparing. America’s Plan is building now, which is correct. But the specific lesson is temporal: platform infrastructure, deliberation culture, and issue hub capacity need to be substantially built before the moment that demands them, not assembled while public attention is already engaged and pressure is already building. The window for preparation is almost always longer than it appears, until it isn’t.
Think seriously about coordination across organizations. Project 2025 was not Heritage alone. It functioned as a coordination layer across a movement ecosystem — 100+ organizations contributing, sharing vocabulary, and acting with coherent direction. America’s Plan currently operates as a standalone platform. Scaling its impact requires thinking clearly about how it connects to organizations already working on the same issues: not to become their communication arm, not to subordinate its editorial independence to their agendas, but to serve as shared infrastructure beneath them. The civic commons concept is exactly suited to this function if it is built with that coordination role explicitly in mind.
Train the participants before they are in the role. The Presidential Administration Academy was low-budget video content. But it existed. It gave recruits a baseline preparation for specific functions. America’s Plan needs the equivalent: onboarding materials for new participants, facilitation guides for issue hub leaders, contribution standards for the commons, and escalation protocols for the deliberation forum. These are not bureaucratic overhead. They are what turns willing participants into effective ones, and they are what allows the project to scale without degrading in quality.
Have a ready plan for each issue’s first window. Every issue has a window — a moment when public attention, political pressure, and institutional susceptibility briefly align. Project 2025 was ready for its window because it had spent years preparing for it. America’s Plan needs issue-specific “first window” plans: what does organized public pressure look like on this issue in the first six months of activity? What are the concrete demands? Who are the decision-makers being targeted? What does accountability look like if they comply, and what does it look like if they don’t? Without this, issue hubs risk becoming spaces for documenting problems rather than mechanisms for changing them.
Treat the commons as the project’s most important long-term asset. The Mandate for Leadership represents decades of accumulated conservative policy thinking. It did not appear fully formed — it accumulated through sustained institutional investment over time. America’s Plan’s commons and wiki is the structural answer to the accumulation problem. But it needs to be treated with corresponding seriousness: actively maintained, linked to from anchor articles and forum discussions, developed before it is urgently needed, and regarded as the project’s primary long-term infrastructure rather than as a secondary feature to be built eventually.
What America’s Plan Should Not Learn
Intellectual honesty requires this section.
Project 2025’s methods included secrecy, ideological screening, loyalty tests, and a systematic plan to use democratic institutions as weapons rather than as systems to be held accountable. It concentrated power rather than distributing it. It defined “the people” narrowly, in terms that excluded most Americans, and designed its infrastructure to serve that definition.
These are not just morally objectionable. They are structurally self-defeating for a project whose entire theory of change depends on being trustworthy, transparent, and genuinely accountable to affected people. The moment America’s Plan operates with ideological screening instead of open deliberation, or with coordination that excludes affected parties in favor of insider efficiency, it has abandoned the theory of change that makes it something other than another interest group competing for institutional control.
The lesson Project 2025 offers is about discipline, comprehensiveness, timing, and preparation — not about values. America’s Plan should match the seriousness of execution while remaining anchored to the values that make its project structurally different: transparency, affected-party leadership, accountability to outcomes and rights rather than to ideology, and the accumulation of public knowledge as a shared resource rather than as a competitive advantage.
The failure mode to avoid is learning the wrong lessons. Becoming more centralized, more secretive, more focused on winning than on building something that works. Project 2025 succeeded on its own terms precisely because it had no ambivalence about concentrating power. America’s Plan’s terms are different, and the discipline required to stay anchored to them while also becoming more effective is harder than either the Project 2025 model or the conventional progressive campaign model.
Closing
The asymmetry between these two projects is real. Project 2025 had decades of institutional history, $22 million in preparation funding, and the full apparatus of the Heritage Foundation — one of the most effective political organizations in American history. America’s Plan is being built publicly, with far fewer resources, without a parent institution.
But the strategic lessons are available to anyone willing to examine them honestly. What Project 2025 demonstrated is that comprehensive, long-horizon civic infrastructure — when it exists, when it is staffed with prepared participants, when it has a ready playbook — is devastatingly effective. It does not require a majority. It does not require public enthusiasm at the moment of deployment. It requires that the work be done in advance.
The question for America’s Plan is not whether it agrees with Project 2025’s goals. It does not, and the disagreement is fundamental. The question is whether it will build something comparably serious — comprehensive, layered, proactively staffed, and equipped with ready plans — before the next window closes.
This article was researched and drafted with AI assistance under human review. See our full AI and editorial practices.
A few notes on structure worth flagging for when you paste this in:
- The eight lessons in the core section use bold lead phrases as navigation anchors — these work well as-is in WordPress, but if you want them to breathe more, each could become its own
###subheading - “What America’s Plan Should Not Learn” deliberately follows rather than precedes the lessons section, so the piece ends on the forward-looking challenge rather than a defensive caveat
- The closing paragraph’s final sentence — “before the next window closes” — is intentionally unspecified. It applies to whatever the current moment is, without dating the article to a particular political event